A co-worker of ours recently offered to take us on a tour of a coffee plantation. Katrina and I, joined by med student Niki and psychiatry resident Uri, followed Deus up the side of hospital hill (the hill near the hospital that we'd been meaning to climb for, oh, 5 months or so).
About a quarter of the way up we come upon a small compound where a woman meets us and offers, in Rufumbia, to start our tour down by the coffee trees. It turns out she's Deus' godmother and co-proprietor of this enchanting little plantation.
Those little redd-ish berries above Deus' arm in the picture are coffee!! Some of our more cultured readers may be perfectly aware that coffee in its raw form is about as different as could be from the dark stuff we buy by the pound. It was brand-new to us, however. After winding through a few stands of small coffee trees (they keep them short to make harvesting easier) we wound up a small hill to the backyard of the house. There we tried our hand at hulling the berries.
This gadget strips the coffee of its outer, fruity shell, separating it from the bean, which at this point is pale green and encased in a milky-white casing.
Here are where the de-beaned coffee berries end up. The tub of water is for testing for bad berries: the ones you don't want float!
Next comes pounding. This is not a crude start to the grinding process (the beans are much too resilient to be split by mere wood!) but rather a fast way to get the white casing off all the beans. A few minutes of pounding and you've separated out the little green beans.
Here's where things got ratcheted up to the next level. We would have all been content to let our coffee tour come to a polite close after the pounding. After all, we'd seen the tree, seen the berries, and seen how you coax the little bean out into the open. But our tour guide had other plans. In a small sheltered area, she deftly lit a quick fire between three cooking stones and set a pot filled with the green coffee beans we had just smashed over the flames. It was roasting time! Katrina took a turn stirring and after about 30 minutes the beans had been transformed into a dark, shimmery, steamy mass.
Wow, right? That's some freshly-roasted coffee.
Deus prepares way too many mugs of coffee with three different methods: the quick steep, the stir-the-grounds-right-in, and the loooong steep. Each method imparts a slightly different flavor and intensity. We passed the mugs around and smacked our lips and looked thoughtful. But before any of that happened we had to grind it!
By hand, of course! The gizmo attached to the bench is the hand-crank grinder which, even you think it's going to be no big deal is hugely tough. Uri and I (and Jay who jogged up the hill to join us) were wiped after our measly little quarter kilo.
After sipping our coffee in the yard (maybe the freshest we'll ever have?) the group decided to keep heading up the hill. After all, Katrina and I had yet to make it to the top and we were already part of the way there.
You can see Lake Mutanda down below us.
And higher still we climbed...
...until we reached the top and could look over the other side at the whole of Kisoro stretched out in front of us.
The way down was very steep and slidey but it was a very peaceful early dusk time and we made our way down slowly.
We'll keep a lookout for more adventures and share them as soon as ONE of us gets un-lazy enough to find the pictures on their phone and post the darn things already.
